Hey guys. So I’m used to the regular forum format like phpBB and IP Board where it looks like this: http://imgur.com/XlyR6cc

So, where it says Welcome to IPS, that’s the category name.

Under that, you have News and Information, and Pre-Sales, those are your FORUMS.

Then you have a space underneath the categories as can be seen in the picture.

This makes sense because your CATEGORIES are SEPARATED from each other, and the FORUMS, are listed underneath.

The way bbPress it, you can click a category. This makes ZERO sense, there is NO reason to click on the category.

Also, as can also be seen in the picture, the amount of topics, and replies are to the right side, with the recent reply, time, latest thread, and time to the right.

This can be done by anyone with some moderate CSS knowledge and WordPress know how, unfortunately I possess little of both.

So I’m here for your help. Please share your wisdom with me and help me get this layout. This is a layout SO many people have asked for, yet I have found no tutorials on getting anything like this and it just astounds me considering how popular bbPress is, I don’t know why bbPress has a god awful layout.

Note: Please do not make any “well this is how bbPress is supposed to look like so you should deal with it” comments. I’m not here to hear that.

Thank you in advance to anyone who helps me achieve this. I really appreciate it.

[@lynqoid Participant 10 years, 10 months ago]

Hi Mycelus,

I would recommend trying to gain a little css knowledge if your up for the challenge as it can get a lot done with WordPress and bbPress. Even just by hiding things with display:none or positioning things absolutely to get them in the right place.

If you want to try and get the look and feel of phpbb or ipboard then you could take a look at the bbPress starter theme I created. It gets you onto a good footing with the layout and then you can go onto styling the colours from there.

http://www.epicwebs.co.uk/bbpress-tutorials/bbpress-starter-theme/.

You can also find the topic about it here on bbPress: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/i-have-created-a-bbpress-starter-theme-with-a-phpbb-look-and-feel/.

Good luck! 🙂

[@mycelus Participant 10 years, 10 months ago]

While I appreciate your work, this is not a viable solution.

The fact that bbPress comes out of the box with a box that says “forum” makes no sense.

Any forums I’ve seen (IPB, XenForo, phpBB, etc etc etc) have boxes for each category, and then the forum names, not a box that says forum, then the categories, then the forums underneath, bbPress’ layout makes no sense and I am not looking to download a child theme and then have to customize it because I don’t currently possess enough CSS and WordPress knowledge to do so.

I am learning, Im not sitting around or anything, but bbPress should look like the other forum layouts because it’s current layout makes 0 sense.

Are there any repositories with some example images of how to go about styling bbPress? I don’t know if it’s just me but bbPress has been around for years if I’m not mistaken and there’s a surprising lack of documentation on it for how popular it is.